Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 22–October 25, 2026
New York

Some artists cut close to the bone. Biography and myth conspire to leave us with a wondrous and terrifying feeling of recognition. In other words, there are artists in whom we see ourselves, kindred spirits who have, through fate and foresight, understood the way of things as we do. For me, that artist is the late photographer Peter Hujar, and I suspect I am not alone, given the ever-growing fascination with both Hujar and his images. Consider Andrew Durbin’s 2026 dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek and Ira Sachs’s 2025 film Peter Hujar’s Day. But photography, like reverence, is a wily thing—the one born from fact and clothed in fiction, the other born from fiction and clothed in fact. Susan Sontag—good friend, occasional subject, and intellectual force in Hujar’s life—put it best: photographs “are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”

Such is the case with Hujar:Contact, an exhibition of more than 110 contact sheets—drawn from an archive of 5,783 sheets, a dizzying feat by show curator Joel Smith—and twenty enlargements, spanning the years 1954 to 1985. Smith’s chronological framing is perhaps the show’s most straightforward curatorial conceit, lending it something of a forensic-meets-all-knowing sensibility. And yet, the mapping of dates, the grafting of timelines onto technical developments, the binding of this moment to that place, all do little to dispel the aura that surrounds Hujar or the totemic charge invested in his images.

Without question, Smith’s formal analysis—paired with Olivia McCall’s heroic decipherment of Hujar’s cryptic “job books”—will be of great value to Hujar scholars. But what is also made manifest is the hand of fate and chance in Hujar’s life. The precision of Smith’s feat and the granular depth the contact sheets afford only sharpen how singular the events and figures Hujar captured were. Hujar’s New York, his circle of friends and subjects, asserts a mythical influence on culture to this day. After all, what’s not to marvel at: Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Marsha P. Johnson. All the great queer patron saints are there. Retrospection, however, is the twin of prophecy: both lay claim to a future that has not yet arrived. An exhibition led by the one reads as an act of the other. Is this a bad thing? Not if the promise of daring beauty and brilliance, even when haunted by death’s specter, is what you seek.

Thus, in the sequence of images Hujar made on his 1963 trip to the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo—his second trip to Italy, with his then-lover, the painter Paul Thek—we see the eleven images from the series Hujar would later use to close his only monograph, Portraits in Life and Death (1976). In another contact sheet, Canal Street Pier with David Wojnarowicz (1983), we follow Hujar during his forays into the crumbling Canal Street Pier, his one-time lover and lifelong collaborator David Wojnarowicz appearing in one frame next to a graffito cow, in another, behind a cloudy pane of glass. There’s a mortal circularity to Hujar photographing Wojnarowicz; too soon it would be Wojnarowicz photographing Hujar’s lifeless visage shortly after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1987. Death stalks Hujar’s images, for him and for us. Speaking of: included in the show are the contact sheets behind one of Hujar’s most iconic images—Candy Darling in her hospital bed at Cabrini Health Care Center, bodega flowers in vases everywhere (1973). I’ve always loved this picture: Darling’s languid pose, that platinum hair, her flawless lip. It’s a Horst P. Horst glamour portrait, staged on a deathbed. The shoot’s contact sheets are a revelation, not because they reveal how staged the image was—Superstar Darling was too schooled in Andy Warhol’s ways of self-fashioning for it to be anything else—but because they convey Darling’s singular vision of beauty and grace. Her death was going to be a final performance of divine flawlessness. John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet of body and soul who spent his life preoccupied by thoughts of mortality and heaven, staged his death portrait as he lay stricken in his final days. “Mighty and dreadful,” Donne rebuked death: “thou art not so.” Death shadows Hujar’s subjects—Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Hujar himself, all from AIDS-related complications—but there are also fearlessness and vitality and curiosity in the lives that were lived before their ends.